Vietnam Fine Arts Museum

A rattan chair, a curtain of flowers, and a girl of eight sitting very still, her small hands clasped in her lap.

The year was 1943, in a room on Hàng Cót Street in Hanoi. The girl's name was Thúy, the eldest of four brothers and sisters. That day she wore a pale pink tunic of Hà Đông silk. A relative she called uncle was the painter Trần Văn Cẩn. When he saw her in that silk, he asked her to sit down so he could paint her.

So Thúy sat on the rattan chair, leaning a little to the left. The painter laid on the oil paint slowly, one stroke at a time. He painted her dark eyes, round and wide. He painted the full cheeks, the small pursed lips, the hair parted to one side. When the picture was done, he gave it a name as simple as a family nickname: Em Thúy, Little Thúy.

The painting is not large. It stands 60.5 centimeters high. It is 45.5 centimeters wide. Yet for more than 80 years, people have stood silent before it, as if the girl were about to say hello.

Today Em Thúy sits at 66 Nguyễn Thái Học Street, in the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum. And the house that keeps her has a story of its own.

The French put up the building in the 1930s. Back then it was a boarding house for the daughters of French officials. The girls came to Hanoi from all over Indochina to go to school. In 1962, the Ministry of Culture renovated the building. It added touches of the Vietnamese village communal house to the Western design. On June 24, 1966, the museum officially opened to visitors. A house that once looked after schoolgirls now keeps the portrait of a little girl.

The reason one small portrait is so precious goes back to 1925. That year the French painter Victor Tardieu founded the Fine Arts College of Indochina in Hanoi. Vietnamese students came to study painting, sculpture, architecture, art history and crafts. They learned the Western way of painting. Then they brought two materials of their own country back to life: silk and lacquer.

Trần Văn Cẩn was one of those students. The same school produced painters who later became masters. Nguyễn Phan Chánh studied there. So did Tô Ngọc Vân and Nguyễn Gia Trí. Nguyễn Sáng studied there too. Dương Bích Liên entered the very last class of the school. Today the paintings of that whole generation hang in the museum beside Em Thúy.

Among them is Two Young Women and a Child by Tô Ngọc Vân, painted in oil in 1944. The canvas is more than a meter tall. Two young women in áo dài tunics sit talking quietly on a veranda. Beside them a little boy plays, lost in his game. It is only a peaceful hour from long ago, kept forever.

In 1963, Nguyễn Sáng painted the lacquer work Admission to the Party at Điện Biên Phủ. Điện Biên Phủ was the 1954 battle in which Việt Minh forces defeated the French. The painting is 180 centimeters wide. It stands 122.3 centimeters high, many times the size of Em Thúy. Its surface carries the traditional colors of lacquer: vermilion red, gold, silver and eggshell white. Up close, the lacquer glows in a way quite unlike oil paint.

Nguyễn Sáng had three more painter friends. One was Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm. The other two were Dương Bích Liên and Bùi Xuân Phái. The art world calls the four men by one short name: the quartet Sáng, Nghiêm, Liên, Phái. They are seen as the summit of modern Vietnamese painting. Bùi Xuân Phái painted the old streets of Hanoi so often that people call his pictures Phố Phái, meaning the streets of Phái. His paintings are in this museum too.

The museum holds far more than that. It keeps nearly 20,000 objects and works of art. More than 2,000 of them are on display across three floors. There are stone statues from Champa, an ancient kingdom on the central and southern coast of what is now Vietnam. There are relief carvings from the Lý and Trần times. The Lý dynasty ruled Vietnam from 1009 to 1225. The Trần dynasty ruled it from 1225 to 1400. There is the art of the village communal house, and there is traditional pottery. Within this treasure house are nine National Treasures. In 2013, three of them were recognized together: Em Thúy, Two Young Women and a Child, and the lacquer by Nguyễn Sáng.

But there was a time when Em Thúy fell ill. The hot, humid climate made the canvas sag, and its fibers grew weak. Dust clung to the surface, with soot from cigarette smoke and even traces of insects. The paint cracked in many places, and in some it had flaked away. In 2004, the museum and an Australian conservator set out to heal the painting.

The treatment went through seven steps. They photographed the painting and recorded every damaged spot. They cleaned the surface and took off the old layers of varnish. They repainted the places where the paint had flaked, and they made the painting a new frame. The conservator called this small picture the Mona Lisa of Vietnam. And Em Thúy was well again.

The girl on the rattan chair grew up too. Thúy trained as a teacher. As the teacher Nguyễn Minh Thúy, she taught literature, history and geography to class after class of students. In the years when she was still strong, her eldest son would take her to the museum. An elderly teacher stood face to face with herself as a girl of eight. She died in 2024, at the age of 89.

If you stand quietly before Em Thúy for a moment and look into those dark eyes, the girl seems to look back.

In a quiet gallery of the museum, the flowered curtain is still behind her. The silk is still pale pink. The small hands are still clasped in her lap. Outside, people come and go, and one season follows another. And Em Thúy is still eight years old, still sitting quietly on the rattan chair, looking out.